Latin America's drug problem is our own creation

August 26, 2001|By Steve Chapman. Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board.

It's been four whole months since a Peruvian fighter jet shot down an American missionary plane wrongly suspected of smuggling drugs, and the Peruvian government is ready to stop wallowing in grief. It wants to get back to the job of intercepting such flights, just as soon as it can persuade the United States to go along.

Why? Because the interdiction effort, in Peru's view, has been an enormous success. The amount of Peruvian land planted in coca, the stuff from which cocaine is made, has declined by 70 percent since 1995. The foreign minister worries that if the anti-smuggling campaign doesn't resume soon, drug production could increase.

But the success is less than meets the eye. In the first place, it comes at a high cost. In the April debacle, a Baptist missionary and her infant daughter died when their aircraft--clearly marked and in radio contact with air traffic controllers--was fired on by a Peruvian fighter working in tandem with a CIA surveillance plane.

This incident, however, was not exactly a surprise. President Clinton approved the program in 1994 despite a State Department memo that concluded, "There is a risk of killing people not involved in criminal activity." The department warned that "a shoot-down leading to the death of innocent persons would likely be a serious diplomatic embarrassment for the United States." Not to mention that some innocent persons would be dead.

Some supporters of the drug war may think a couple of dead bystanders in South America is a reasonable tradeoff for reducing drug supplies and discouraging consumption here. Unfortunately, the deaths were wholly in vain. Peru's drug harvest has declined--but growers have simply expanded production elsewhere to take up the slack. In neighboring Colombia, which has stepped forward to replace Peru as the world's biggest exporter, coca output has risen 168 percent since 1995.

If there were a shortage of cocaine in the U.S., the drug would become very expensive. In fact, as University of Maryland scholar Peter Reuter notes in a recent article in The Milken Institute Review, the going rate has actually dropped over the last decade, and high school kids say it's about as easy to get today as it was in 1991. Drug traffickers have had no trouble maintaining the flow of cocaine to eager American consumers.

Washington has the perfect answer to that complication--taking the fight to Colombia. But the Clinton administration and the Colombian government have already tried that. New U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said last month that, to her surprise, "there are far more cocaine- and heroin-producing crops growing here than previously believed," and that drug crops are sprouting "where none was believed to have existed before."

This happens because poor peasants can make more money from these crops than from others. Trying to stop millions of Third World farmers from doing what they need to do to feed their families is a task on the order of building sand castles during a hurricane. Perversely, successful coca eradication programs only push up the prices paid to those who manage to grow it. Every success contains the seeds of failure.

The remedy being offered by the two governments is massive spraying of herbicides to destroy coca in the fields. But small farmers find that the spraying often also destroys the legal crops they plant for food, a development that caused the United Nations to denounce the program as "inhuman."

Choking off the supply of illicit drugs is an old fantasy that stubbornly resists being translated into reality. Time and again, the U.S. government and its allies have launched massive campaigns to eradicate crops or stamp out smuggling. Many of them have succeeded at their direct purpose--but none has actually made it hard for Americans to keep snorting, smoking or shooting up.

In each case, says Kevin Zeese, president of the organization Common Sense for Drug Policy, "the effect is to create new drug traffickers, new routes, new sources and new drugs." The cocaine epidemic of the 1980s came about because of anti-marijuana efforts in the 1970s. Anti-heroin efforts in Pakistan and Thailand caused production to shift to Afghanistan and Burma.

Now, the Taliban government in Afghanistan is cracking down on poppy-growing--which helps to explain why heroin production is on the rise in Colombia. Even if Washington and Bogota could uproot every evil plant in Colombia, poor peasants someplace else would quickly be recruited to fill the gap.

The problem lies in the law of supply and demand, which no government can repeal. The flow of drugs will continue as long as there are Americans willing to pay handsomely to get high. So maybe we should stop expecting the rest of the world to save us from ourselves.